DARVO Circular Logic Violates Due Process, Eschews Logic

When one of the world’s most preeminent cancer researchers and a Nobel Prize short-lister, Dr. David Sabatini, was accused by a fellow researcher of sexual harassment, leading to his recent ouster at MIT, it’s easy to see why news outlets like the Boston Globe, Science Magazine and the New York Times hyped the story as the latest example of the #MeToo movement’s righteous fury.  

But what deserves more careful study is how those same opportunistic voices of outrage have fallen mute now that the fuller facts of the case have been laid bare. Subsequent reporting by journalists like Common Sense’s Suzy Weiss and Daily Wire’s Ashe Short did the actual legwork that those self-proclaimed standard-bearing publications somehow failed to undertake. 

They revealed that Dr. Sabatini and his accuser, a 29-year-old PhD, had been in a lengthy romantic relationship that went bad after Sabatini refused his paramour’s marriage proposal. And far from running a lab with a hostile environment, some four dozen alumni of that very lab attested to Sabatini’s integrity, vowing they’d never seen any improper behavior from him. 

A much more–damning to the original–caricatured narrative was whipped up by those who are meant to be objective, neutral reporters. But have any of these news organizations rescinded or revised their reporting or even updated readers that it turns out there was more to the story than it originally appeared? Of course not.

Instead, the latest pivot in this contretemps comes from the health care journal MedPage, in an opinion piece arguing that when another institution, NYU Langone School of Medicine, merely considered hiring Sabatini, it warranted even more harassment. Such a bizarre phenomenon even has a clinical name, DARVO. A pathology “first described in 1997” in the Journal of Feminism and Psychology, the MedPage authors explain, this acronym describes an additional offense that occurs when the accused “denies, attacks, and reverses victim and offender.”

Well by that definition if a defendant were to say, “The accusation is untrue, I resent it, and I insist on my integrity,” that would be a textbook case of DARVO. For DARVO fanatics, even merely defending oneself against patently untrue claims is an affront to others’ security. Rejecting an accusation, in other words, is not just proof of guilt but actually compounds the crime. 

The five authors, Resa E. Lewiss, David G. Smith, Shikha Jain, W. Brad Johnson, and Jennifer Freyd argue that simply by examining the Sabatini matter, New York University Lagone thus joined him in culpability. To them, NYUL showed “the willingness of leaders to dismiss or overlook these behaviors.”  

All media reports suggest that NYUL weighed Dr. Sabatini’s accomplishments and potential for achievement against the claims made against him at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During this time, some NYU students and activists protested against Dr. Sabatini, baselessly smearing him as an impending threat to the school’s students, in hopes of intimidating the university from hiring one of the world’s foremost cancer scientists. Still, the school did its due diligence, appointing several women across several departments to lead the review and remaining transparent with the public throughout the investigation process. They made no commitments about the outcome and, despite vociferous urging, they remained steadfast in that methodical process. 

Surely, this would all seem to satisfy everything these MedPage contributors are urging, but it still can’t penetrate the circular logic in how the vital issues of sexual harassment in academia are being regarded. Any accusation deserves a thorough look, this thinking goes, so long as it excludes any legitimate due process. By this self-fulfilling method, charges of harassment are always and ipso facto true.  

That this obviously absurd theory should appear in the pages of rigorously analytical publications is troubling enough but dressing it up with a clinical label like “DARVO” to pretend it has some scientific legitimacy makes fools of the readers. It’s a kind of rhetorical alchemy to conjure a condition, give it a formal acronym, sprinkle in PhDs and MDs, publish in a serious health care-focused outlet and, presto!, you have a seemingly irrefutable insight.  

The only problem – one that used to be fatal for scientific inquiry – is that the DARVO thesis is, by design, unfalsifiable.  If you argue against a charge of DARVO, that just shows you are committing it. A less fancy word for this kind of argument: ridiculous. 

No serious person is pro-sexual harassment. Men and women who are victims of it, whether in academia or elsewhere, deserve swift justice. That’s why grappling with these issues should not require a disclaimer about supporting victims of that sort of wrongdoing. But abandoning basic principles like scrutiny and adjudication does not serve that cause. Instead, it warps a collaborative community into a mob of competing factions, each wrestling for control of the media’s kangaroo court. 

Ellen Carmichael is the president of The Lafayette Company, a Washington, D.C. based communications firm, and specializes in both health care policy and academic freedom issues.